Exploring two 'Greatest Pictures' CD-roms

I’ve been making some homemade CDs for friends and family and that requires CD cases. At Læsehesten, a second-hand comics/music store here in Aalborg, they are very familiar with replacing busted CD cases, and as such they have a lot of cases in stock. Indeed, they sold me copies of Greatest Pictures CD-rom for 1 DKK a piece, so I naturally bought 20. I just needed the case, but decided to investigate the contents of these age-old clipart CD-roms.

I only have Greatest Pictures 3 and Greatest Pictures 5 and the CD does not indicate how many is in this elusive series. It is made by a now defunct Danish company MediaProducts A/S as they went bankrupt in 2001. Naturally, I ripped the CDs of everything and uploaded it to archive.org and can be seen here and here. It seems most of this stuff is in the open domain, but the CDs do not specify it explicitly. The CDs consist of an executable that I cannot run, but the CD speaks of a slideshow application amongst other things. The CDs consist of exactly 2018 pictures in total all of which are in .gif format (not animated). The pictures are split into 15 categories with each their folder on the CD-rom. I went through each and here is my take

• Animals: Dogs, cats, birds, exotic animals and the like.
• Anime: A lot of anime girls and mechas. I think most of them are screenshots from their respective series. Nonetheless, I am not very known in this subject so I do not immediadately reckognize any of them.
• Art: Drawings, classical & modern paintings and old photographs. There are also a surprising amount of album cover art from the likes of The Cure, Iron Maiden etc.
• Cars: Modern cars, classical cars, motorcycles.
• Celebrity: Random assortment of celebrities with featuring an abnormally large amount of stills from Doctor Who and Star Trek.
• Compgfx: Computer graphics, 3D renders and technical demos. This is probably my favourite category due to the hilariously outdated raytracing and the glossification of every object in the scene.
• Drawings: Drawings or computer graphics. Most of these are quite poor quality.
• Faces: Mostly faces of women but also celebrities. Probably the category with the worst average image resolution.
• Fantasy: Dragons, castles, magic and futurism. Many of the works pertain to the World of TRS but I am unsure if they are from the book itself or fanart as I haven’t access to it.
• Lingerie: Suggestive women in lingerie. This is the most not safe for work folder out of all them, practically bordering on soft-core porn.
• Nature: Natural landscapes, space pictures, urban environments and houses.
• Mix: Everything that doesn’t fit anywhere else. Contains a large amount of scans of beer coasters.
• People: Slice of life pictures of people in their natural habitats. Includes some celebrities and sportsfolk. There are a lot of figure skating pictures
• Trains: Old trains, new trains and even a single train wreck.
• Swimsuit: Merely women in swimsuits. Much like the Women category.
• Women: Models, conventionally attractive women but also women in sports. Features a lot of pin-up like pictures but no nudity. This is also by far the largest category.

I went through all 2018 pictures and chose 187 pictures which I found the most interesting or telling of the general content on the CDs. To do this, I used the image tagging and archiving software Hydrus for speeding up the process. I made them into a large collage using ImageMagick which can be seen below.

Album removed

There used to be an album here with all the pictures, but sadly it cannot seem to stay up.